Statistical information is generated and used in respect of a wide variety of systems. The present invention has particular application in the field of contact centres or call centres in which supervisors have a need to note the activity level of the centre as a whole, of various agents grouped by skillset, or of individual agent activities. Other statistics of primary importance are the numbers of calls waiting, the time of the longest waiting call, etc. While the invention is described in relation to contact centres, it has wider application and can be adapted to many other systems.
In current contact centre technology, statistical information is derived from events (such as a particular agent becoming available to take calls, the arrival of a call at the contact centre, the transfer of a call to an agent, the termination of a call, etc.). These are then fed to a statistics generation programme which typically has a number of modules designed to generate and display a particular type of statistical information. For example, one of the modules might keep track of events notified during the immediately preceding ten minutes and update a number of statistical displays to show the statistics for a moving ten minute window. Another statistical module might operate on a cumulative interval to date (i.e. a cumulative statistical record of events which is updated continually until the module is reset), such as for each eight hour shift, which is zeroed at the beginning of the shift and as events occur, they add to the cumulative statistical data for that eight hour period. A further module might provide instantaneous statistics, such as the number of calls currently waiting, the longest current waiting time for a call, the number of agents busy/idle, etc.
This type of statistical programme is not particularly adaptable and if one wishes to provide a moving fifteen minute window, for example, it is necessary to write a new module which will monitor and collect the relevant event data, calculate the relevant statistics, and display them for this new time window.